The early church did not believe in Original Sin the way that Augustine did and it was HE that made a doctrine that caused infants to have to become baptized because the church at HIS time accepted his teaching.
); it seems to make the infant and the child into something less than full-fledged members of the Church. They're either in or they're not, right? It's very odd.
I told him that it allows them to enter the Church but he knows baptism is also for the forgiveness of sins so he was curious how does regeneration work.As we pray in the Coptic version of the liturgy of St. Basil, "For no one is pure, if his life be but a day." We are born into a fallen world, even though we do not enter it guilty of anything.
There are also other reasons to baptize infants that don't really have to do with ancestral/original sin, such as the fact that this is the normative method of entering the Church community. Christ does say that unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood, we have no life in us, and so it would be a deprivation of life to not baptize them, since of course communion is restricted to baptized believers only.
This is one thing I absolutely don't get about some western Christians (and even non-Christians like Mormons, who I've learned fairly recently have a big hang-up on baptizing babies...kinda weird when you consider that they think of baptism as being so essential that they regularly 'baptize' dead people
Baptism is commanded by Christ to be used by His Church as the sacred rite that marks one's entrance into the newness of Life in Him. One cannot be born again unless one dies to the world of sin in order to be fed Life (God's grace). Baptism metaphorically, and really, communicates this blessed mode of existence (i.e. being in Communion with God through the dying to the world of self-love and sinful passion and being made alive by the Grace of God). We are baptized into His death, and become fully alive with His Life.
